Rosemarie Kanzler

Builder's daughter who became fabulously rich through her five marriages and gave parties for the brightest stars

ROSEMARIE KANZLER, who has died aged 85, was a jobbing builder's daughter who became one of the world's richest women.

Her story would have done credit to the pen of the novelist Jacqueline Susann. After a humble upbringing in Zurich, she acquired, by means of her feminine attractions, an immense fortune, with properties in London, France, Greece and Argentina. She was surrounded by fabulous treasures, entertained royalty and film stars and always retained something of her blonde, Dietrich-esque allure.

But in her old age, married to her fifth husband, she remained sensitive about her route to riches. In 1986 she successfully sued Taki Theodoracopulos for having written in The Spectator that she was surrounded by "climbers and parasites" and that when he arrived for lunch "her painted face sagged like a collapsed cake". She told the court he had made her out to be "a high-class tart" and was awarded £15,000 damages, with The Spectator paying the costs of £150,000.

She was born Leni Ravelli on January 26 1915. Her father was a Catholic Italian, her mother a Lutheran German. As a teenager, amply endowed with the "It" factor, Leni readily took on a series of playboy students, athletes and dissident artists in flight from Nazi Germany. Among early admirers were Jean-Jean Millstein, later known as John Mills, founder of Les Ambassadeurs in London, and Georg Sulzer, heir to the colossal Swiss Diesel empire.

By introducing her to opera at an early age, her father seemed to have inadvertently raised her sights from Swiss domesticity to a world of passion and adventure. There was a story that while she was employed as a manicurist, a rich client flashed a substantial jewelled ring in her face, and commiserated that she would never afford such a thing. She vowed to prove her wrong.

Through love and sex, foreign travel, multiple marriage, and the occasional tragic (though not wholly inconvenient) bereavement, she more than achieved this goal. She escaped Zurich through a series of flirtations in St Moritz (to which she scraped her way) and Berlin in the Olympic summer of 1936 (to which she was taken by a party of young bloods in rather more style).

She took elocution lessons from a Jewish refugee, to improve her Swiss German. During an unwelcome sojourn in a convent in her father's old town, Cremona, she tried to sing opera as a mezzo-soprano, but strained her vocal chords.

Her break came when she took up with Peter Kreuder, the German theatre and film composer, remembered for Good Night Sweetheart and for arranging songs for Marlene Dietrich. He became her lover and launched her in Berlin in 1937 as Madeleina Ravelli in a programme of songs by Ravel and others, hoping to have found another Dietrich. This almost succeeded.

With Kreuder she was drawn into the Nazi elite, frequently entertained by Goering and mixing with Himmler and Goebbels. Kreuder took her on a 40-city tour. They visited Sweden and in 1939 Austria and Czechoslovakia. One night in Munich in 1940, she was whisked away by two SS men after a concert, and brought before Hitler, who bade her sing his favourite Viennese songs. This lulled the Fuhrer to sleep.

Soon afterwards she and Kreuder moved to Sweden to sit out the war. But she lost him to a Norwegian starlet, returned to another lover in Berlin, and with the help of yet another lover embarked for Cuba. She arrived in Havana early in 1942, where she found a band of well-heeled foreigners savouring the exuberant night-life. She resolved "to stay for ever".

Ambassadors and South American playboys came and went with attendant jealousies and occasional midnight pistol shots. She was dubbed La Rubia Suiza and accused of spying. When Cuba became involved in the war in 1943, it was time to move to Mexico. Here again, she relied on "a destiny of opportunities that constantly come your way". In 1944 she became the third wife of Manuel Reachi, the film producer who had discovered Rudolf Valentino.

Manuel and Rosemarie (as she now called herself) Reachi lived a boring existence in Monterrey, punctuated by occasional visits to Hollywood and parties given by Cary Grant, Eddy Duchin and Jimmy Stewart. Rosemarie Reachi, after separating from her husband, drifted about the playboy world of post-war Europe, her path eased by access to a joint bank account set up by her husband. Maurice Chevalier, Aly Khan, Elsa Maxwell, Stewart Granger and a number of high-living bachelors were her friends.

Then she fell for Prince Youka Troubetskoy, Barbara Hutton's brother-in-law, a man she later described her "true-blue truelove", and moved in with him in Paris. She was deliriously happy but later moved to New York.

Freed from her attachment, there was an amusing misunderstanding with an Englishman called John Joliffe Tufnell, who proposed to her. He appeared to be heir to a great estate, Langleys, near Chelmsford in Essex, and, as she put in her memoirs, she was taken by "the thought of a Great House in the English countryside". The match came unstuck when she learned that the estate was in trust, and Tufnell discovered that her allowance would cease if she remarried.

Back in New York, Rosemarie Reachi met another Mexican, Carlos Oriani, who became her second husband. He was a tycoon, with an ex-wife, three sons and a young mistress (who on Rosemarie's insistence was given a dowry and dismissed). She and Oriani settled in Mexico where he was so busy empire-building that his bride was left to her own devices.

Eventually, Oriani took to drugs for his nerves and lost most of his money. He went berserk one night, shooting at mirrors, furniture and porcelain. As he was removed in a straitjacket, he cursed the man who was to be his wife's next husband.

Fred Weicker, whom she married in December 1954, was the heir to a vast chemical fortune, being a descendant of Dr Edward Robinson Squibb, who experimented with ether in the 19th century. The fortune rested in the E R Squibb Company and the Squibb Building, an Art Deco Manhattan skyscraper. Fred Weicker's lawyers soon disentangled Rosemarie and Carlos Oriani, and presented her with pleasing documents to show that Fred Weicker wanted her to be well cared for in the event of his demise.

Fred Weicker, though a huge man, an athlete and outdoor man, proved a heavy drinker. Rosemarie Weicker suffered some uncomfortable adventures with him. They lived in the River House in New York, and various other properties, and in happy moments enjoyed nude walks together by the sea in Palm Beach, hand in hand. But Fred Weicker died in his sleep in Canada in March 1955, only four months after the marriage.

Rosemarie Weicker, now a rich widow, was impressed by a vast floral tribute from Weicker's best friend, Ernest Kanzler, who had played the violin at a party for their wedding. Kanzler, himself lately widowed, helped her deal with people who resented having been excluded from Weicker's will. As early as May 1955, Kanzler gave Rosemarie a huge Golconda diamond ring, professing: "I feel engaged to you. And the day you feel engaged to me, you wear it!"

Some weeks later, she agreed to dine with Kanzler at Le Pavillon in New York. At the table she pulled off her long white gloves, with slow drama. The ring was on, and from that day on Kanzler picked up the bills. He was a man who liked to clinch a deal, and on July 11 1955, he married the girl he now called "Itsie-Bitsie". She had enjoyed three husbands within the space of one year.

Ernest Kanzler was rich and successful. As a young lawyer he had represented the Dodge brothers so well against Henry Ford Senior, that Ford offered him a job. By the early 1920s, he was a director of the Ford Motor Company. He married the sister of Mrs Edsel Ford. As he prospered, so he collected art - Holbeins, Rembrandts, Titians. In 1926 Kanzler fell out with Henry Ford over the potential of the Model T, and went into banking, reorganising the Universal Credit Corporation. He became a fundraiser for the Republican Party and a rock of Detroit society.

Rosemarie Kanzler also enjoyed the high life in Detroit, as an outstanding hostess in an age of wild extravagance. Nat "King" Cole was hired to play at parties; it was nothing to fly in two million fresh magnolia leaves for a pastoral bower at a party. Rosemarie Kanzler was to the fore at the Detroit Institute's Flemish Art Exhibition in 1957, patronised by King Baudouin of the Belgians and President Eisenhower.

The Kanzlers moved in the highest society; she once sang for the Duke of Windsor at his house in the Bois de Boulogne. Rosemarie Kanzler declared: "I live totally for the beauty and the pleasure that is available to us in the world." There was one disappointment. She became pregnant, but lost the child.

Ernie Kanzler had promised Rosemarie he would fulfil all her wishes. Between them the Kanzlers owned eight establishments, but Rosemarie yearned to settle in the South of France. On holiday, they looked over to St Jean Cap Ferrat, and Ernie remembered a chateau there, owned by his friend, Charles Monroe. Eventually she bought it. "You have a lot of liquid assets lying around, dearie," said Ernie. She signed the cheque.

She employed Boudin, the Duchess of Windsor's designer, to adorn the chateau, built in 1880 by a Russian prince to escape the long winters. It had also been the home of Paris Singer, of the sewing-machine family, who was the lover of Isadora Duncan.

There the Kanzlers set about bringing life back to the Cote d'Azur, with a stream of parties, attended by the Rainiers, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Stewart Granger, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Kirk Douglas, Bob Hope, Louis Jourdan and others. In one home, Henry Ford II fell for Christina Vettore Austin, in another Stavros Niarchos for Charlotte Ford.

In 1967, Ernie Kanzler fell ill at St Moritz, and remained an invalid until his death later that year. In his last months he was cared for by a German nurse, to whom he gave a Ford Thunderbird (a car he had helped develop in the mid 1950s). He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, where the Kanzler family had built an elaborate 18th century garden, with two vast urns, one Parisian and genuine, the other a copy.

Now a very rich widow, Rosemarie Kanzler spent months with lawyers fending off tax agents from the IRS, who settled for weeks on end in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, attempting to levy a 35 per cent gift tax on the Kanzler estate. At length she saw them off. She bought a vast flat in London and resisted a series of fortune hunters. Tony Renis, the Italian composer of Quando, Quando, Quando was a more genuine admirer. There were unfounded rumours that she might marry the 10th Duke of Marlborough, or Porchy the 6th Earl of Carnarvon.

In the summer of 1971 she met a lean, young banker, Jean-Pierre Marcie-Riviere. He was married, though his wife soon committed suicide, enabling them to marry in 1972. Rosemarie gave him $1 million to square his pride. They moved from Cap Ferrat to the Villa Hinista in Greece, and she bought a stud-farm in Argentina, which she called La Favorita, set in 1,800 acres of pampas grass.

Her last marriage endured 18 years, but ended in acrimony. At one stage she threw a porphyry vase at her young husband. They were divorced in 1989 and she reverted to the name of Kanzler. In her remaining years, she divided her time between London, Greece and the Argentine. She was a generous hostess, but her more timid guests were daunted by late-night invitations to a nude swim in the pool with their octogenarian but tactile hostess.

In October this year she launched her memoirs, Yesterday is Gone (a collaboration with an American writer, Kathryn Livingston), at a party at the Hyde Park Hotel, covered by Hello!.